Wide Area Information Filter
 

The "WAIF" (Wide Area Information Filtering) project investigates structuring techniques for future-generation large-scale distributed applications where we attempt to:

"Get rid of the traditional computer."

WAIF is focussing on event-driven architectures supporting a more general publish/subscribe paradigm. The overall goal is to avoid most of the tedious client-server, session-based user interactions dominating the Internet. In a broader perspective, this potentially reduces the amount of time a user has to spend in front of a traditional computer terminal.

WAIF is a new framework to facilitate easy user access for Internet users to relevant news items. WAIF supports new kinds of browsers, personalized filters, recommendation systems, and-most importantly-an evolution path intended to enable efficient deployment of new techniques that enhance the user retrieval experience.

The environment we conjecture is a ubiquitous and pervasive computing infrastructure where a single user (occasionally) might be supported by thousands, or even millions of computers.

WAIF is a joint project between the University of Tromsų, Cornell University, and UC San Diego.